Until Lions write their own history, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the Hunter …

Main menu

Post navigation

Brown Babies Project

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story is a powerful new documentary which tells the story of six so-called “brown babies” born in postwar occupation Germany.

They were born to German women and African-American soldiers. As illegitimate, biracial, bicultural children who were unwanted by enemy nations, their lives were tragic. For the first time Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story reveals this little known remarkable piece of history through the compelling life stories of the children and their birth parents.

Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story (directed by Regina Griffin) won the award for Best Documentary at the 2011 African American Black Film Festival.

6 thoughts on “Brown Babies Project”

The information presented in this post is fascinating! I enjoyed watching the trailer. This is a history of which I was not aware, but it certainly does not surprise me. Given the historic difficulties and challenges faced by “brown babies” everywhere, I’m convinced that God has a plan for us.

In an ironic way this film cuts close to home. Several males in my family, my mother’s first cousins, served in the military and were stationed in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Two of them came home with Asian brides. They didn’t have children and leave them behind, but returned here to the U.S. to start their families. One of the relationships ended in a bitter divorce. But their daughter is now a very successful woman who is very proud of her Vietnamese and African American heritage.

Looks like a thought-provoking and heartbreaking doco. When one person talks about scrubbing the brown off their skin I was reminded of what started my journey, my drive to understand ‘race’ and ‘racism’ – my baby coming home from school at 5 years of age telling me he didn’t want to be brown any more. He didn’t like it. The shock of it was he was speaking my experience, only I’d never dared name it. I wanted so desperately to know how it comes about that at so tender an age a child already knows the horror if their uneracable colour. I have a better idea of that now, I am much less sure about how to change it. Nga mihi John.

It is heartbreaking to see a five year old child victimized by this monster of the mind that is “racism.” When I was growing up in the fifties and early sixties it was an insult to call someone “black.” Dark skin was (is) viewed with disdain and scorn. It took a “black power” revolution to shock our consciousness out of the conditioning of self-hatred. Some of us recovered only to see the generations following fall into the same trap. I don’t know how we failed. I do know the forces that confront us are resilient in finding ways to metastasize and proliferate this cancer. And it is everywhere. I posted a piece a while back titled “White is a Pigment of the Imagination” that talks about my reaction to seeing skin whitening ads during a recent trip to Ghana, West Africa. I wasn’t surprised but deeply saddened to see how deep those ads had penetrated the market and the culture. I understand the process whereby the sickness spreads. It operates through two principles of white supremacy that people across the globe have been conditioned to adopt and embrace: #1 Be White; #2 Don’t be Black.

Education is the key to breaking the mesmeric hold of this white superiority/black (brown, red, yellow) inferiority complex. But how we educate (deprogram) people in the midst of a massive onslaught on our psyche through the manipulation of images (a subject I know you have examined extensively and with great insight) is a question that I struggle with everyday. Perhaps this proverb holds the answer: Iti noa ana, he pito mata.

I will continue to plant my little sweet potato and hope for a good harvest.